Everyone Is An Atheist

Famous Atheists
in Denial

On this planet, there exist literally thousands of religions/cults, each
with its own particular god/s, each reveling in the certainty that they
alone have it right, and each bewildered by the failure of all the others
to recognize the obvious truth. Some of these religions, the large powerful
proselytizing religions, are a little more adamant about the truth than
others. Each claims to be the "One True Religion" (OTR) and all
share a high level of disdain for Atheism. What seems lost on them is that
in order to maintain their belief in the local OTR, they necessarily practice
a rigorous and mandatory style of selective atheism. They just don't realize
that they are doing it.

Christians make much of the fact that they are the largest religion on
the planet. That is true only if you disregard all the scriptural differences
which make every splinter cult certain that all the others are not true
christians and are going straight to hell where they deserve to burn in
torment forever for their inaccuracies. (Don't believe me? - ask a baptist
where a catholic is going to spend eternity. What is funny is that all
these folks claim that their church, and only their church, teaches straight
from the bible without any fancy "interpretation".) Anyway, for
the sake of this argument, lets disregard all the disparities and scripture-based
infighting and call all the xian cults a single OTR. What seems to escape
them is that, even though they are the largest religion on the planet,
(and many of them take this as clear indication that they are the OTR),
there are still about 75% of the people on this planet who clearly recognize
that xianity is a false religion.

So, every religion shares the same myopia regarding their own deity. Every
religion is the one true religion and all other religions are false. Every
religions god is true while all the others are pretenders. It is childishly
obvious to any devout christian - or muslim - that the thousands of gods
of all the competing superstitious cults are patently false. You can do
the math. I come up with exactly ZERO actual existing deities.

I am an Atheist

By definition, Atheism means only that I have no belief in gods. To say
the least, I find the stories about gods to be unconvincing. To say it
another way, I find the ancient fables to be exactly as convincing as the
stories about Santa Claus or Superman. As a thinking adult, I am under
no obligation to believe what reason and experience show me to be false.

We are all born atheists, without religious belief, without the concept
of Reason, and without the ability to apply skepticism, but possessing
a brain which soaks up information like a sponge, even if that information
is erroneous. It is during this early, pliable phase when parents and society
begin to pummel young, uncritical, defenseless minds with stories of the
locally popular deities, omnipotent powers, eternal life, and the dire
consequences that will accompany disbelief. With these stories comes a
frightening prohibition against any form of skepticism, which inflicts
permanent disability upon the ability to apply Reason. More than merely
frightening, all deistic religions cap off their indoctrination by making
it dangerous, even lethal, to ask simple, reasonable questions about the
most fundamental elements of their faith. Questions and doubt are mental
crimes and grievous insults to the supreme creator of the curious mind.
Deistic religions demand immunity from examination. By crushing all inquiry,
the religions have quieted opposition and rendered huge swaths of civilization
permanently incapable of questioning the answers they have been given –
answers without questions.

Fortunately, it does not work on everyone, and despite the best efforts
of the Southern Baptists, It did not work on me. Somehow I managed to retain
my natural curiosity and, over time, I developed a healthy skepticism and
an inability to blindly accept the ancient god stories without a more coherent
set of explanations than was available in an ancient holy book. I realized
at an early age that what they were selling just wasn’t true.

I did not arrive at this position lightly. I was raised in the church
and every attempt was made to set my mind with Christian dogma. I read
my bible and went regularly to services and church activities. I tried
real hard for awhile to get a sense of “God”, but I sensed only absence.
As my skepticism grew, I couldn’t help but notice that the stories I was
told were strikingly close to the old stories of the Greek and Norse gods,
differing only in the details, not in credibility. The ancient and various
tales – no more reliable or believable than campfire stories, really -
about deities creating the Universe were such obvious mythology that they
were quickly abandoned in favor of a more Scientific and rational examination.
Reason and Science, the mechanisms for the acquisition and validation of
knowledge, won out for the simple reason that they were actually capable
of supplying answers.

The disparity between the ancient fables and the realities of the Universe
was most obvious when contrasting the biblical genesis tale against the
discoveries about origins provided by the study of Cosmology. On origins,
either cosmic or Human, the bible answered correctly in this area not once
and corresponded to reality not at all. Instead, I turned to sources on
astronomy and cosmology, and supplemented over time with evolution, quantum
physics, history, sociology, and psychology. All these subjects taken together
mesh into a coherent and rational explanation for the workings of the Universe.
They also provide some perspective regarding the place of Humans in that
Universe.

A comprehensive explanation is not simple and cannot be reduced to verse-sized
sound bites. It could never have been understood or discovered by uneducated,
illiterate and credulous Humans thousands of years ago. Nor is it palatable
to those who cling to the old stories. The explanations are complex, far-ranging,
and inter-related. The explanations require thought and they require study;
they require process and must stand up to rigorous examination. The explanations
are in no way augmented by the insertion of magical deities. Observed,
and validated facts diverged wildly from the guesswork of the ancients.

In the end, religion made no sense to me. The gap between what the church
taught and what reality showed could not be closed. I finally accepted
that I was a natural-born, fully realized Atheist.

In short, I am utterly convinced, that all the stories about all the thousands
of gods ever proposed by Humans are concoctions based on fear and wishful
thinking, and are not connected to objective reality. I am as certain that
there are no gods as I am that there are no unicorns, or leprechauns, or
monsters under the bed.

I can justify saying that these things do not exist. To make such a statement
will cause logical purists some heartburn due to the fact that it is never
possible to prove a negative. But even the purists know that it is OK to
stop searching for Unicorns.

And so are you.

Now, the point of that whole semi-biographical roundabout was so that
I can show that you are also an Atheist. All adamantly religious people
are hard, committed Atheists. Just not very good ones.

Just like myself, members of every religion, commonly claiming to be the
One True Religion, hold every other religion, also commonly claiming to
be the One True Religion, and held by its practitioners to be absolutely
true, to be utterly false. If you do the math on that you will see that
the vast majority of people on this planet recognize your religion, whatever
it may be, as pure fantasy.

The atheism of the religious is not done after a careful weighing of the
evidence. Nor is it done after a thorough 'compare and contrast’ of the
tenets of your religion against what is known about the workings of the
Universe. True to the early indoctrination of your own religion, you just
plain old don’t and won’t believe in the gods of the other religions. To
you, just as they are to me, they are all obviously false and unworthy
of further consideration. Proof is unnecessary and a waste of time as you
summarily dismiss several thousand alleged gods without any thought whatsoever.

When you examine your attitudes about all the other religions, you can
understand exactly my attitude towards all those religions. Your view of
all those religions varies from mine not at all. In the case of each and
every one of those alleged deities you are experiencing and practicing
pure, hard Atheism.

Of all the thousands of gods that people have believed in, prayed to,
and entrusted their wellbeing to, you retain belief, not surprisingly,
only in your locally popular deity. When you do the math on that, you will
see that, except for your small localized blind spot, you are every bit
the Atheist I am. The only difference is that my Atheism also applies to
your local religion, while you persist in an inexplicable, irrational,
and indefensible breach of consistency.

A final word

Is there a point to all this? Yes. There is an inherent contradiction
built into every fundamentalist religion – open contempt for Atheists while
practicing near universal Atheism towards all other religions. Those who
are bent to religion frequently express incomprehension as to how an Atheist
could not see the “truth” of the existence of their locally popular deity.
Easy. Look to yourself - you do it all the time. You are an Atheist. Welcome
to my world.